Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't possess a business and have no interest (maybe you don't even understand what that's), if you have e-mail, you've experienced the uglier side of email marketing. You've probably even seen the advertisements for email address lists that provide thousands-or even millions-of email addresses. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with a lot of addresses?
You can be certain of one thing: in the event the price is not expensive, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these enormous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They may be equivalent to some list of street addresses taken from your phone book.
Largely, the addresses are harvested from forums, membership or pupil lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, along with other areas where folks gather to swap information. They do not know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. They didn't ask to be added to a mass email list. And they definitely didn't ask to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Harvesting email addresses is legal. But it is widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or will not go to jail. Nevertheless, you might damage your company, perhaps irreparably. The possible consequences for violating the unwritten rule to having your company from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain name.